


Wash Away Your Sins

by exbex



Category: due South
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Character Study, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-23
Updated: 2011-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-27 22:03:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/300530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/exbex/pseuds/exbex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>for primroseburrows, who gave me Gordon Lightfoot's "I'm Not Supposed to Care" as a prompt.  I interpreted it in a fashion that surprised me.  It's a mystical AU, with Fraser as a sin eater (as I have fashioned, not based on the historical practices), and it's quite angsty and sad.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wash Away Your Sins

**Author's Note:**

  * For [primrose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/primrose/gifts).



When Fraser first catches a glimpse of the cross Ray wears, he silently wishes that it were true. The thing he loves most about humans is that they pursue reasoning, even though they constantly, inevitably fail at it.  
If they knew the truth, it would break them.  
**  
The aging that his body endures, the lines and the aches and pains, is a cover, a ruse into fooling everyone that he’s human, but he likes to think of it as an effect of the sins that he’s constantly absorbing, slowly destroying him.  
It was years before he truly absorbed the sins of a mortal, and it seemed poetic that his first main test was to absorb the sins of the man who was his father. There was a bittersweet quality to it, duty and honor tinged with disappointment.  
**  
Never had Fraser felt the weight of his secret more heavily than with his Rays, as he liked to think of them. If there were any souls on Earth whom Fraser would have liked to confided in, it was these two. But humans are supposedly too fragile to carry the burdens that Fraser was designed to bear.  
Sometimes though, Fraser wonders if the Powers That Be have underestimated the species. Fraser couldn’t tell Ray that the effects of Zuko were meant to be absorbed by himself. He could feel, in his conscious, the Powers chiding him for failing, yet he also felt strange sensations, no doubt residual from his human body at watching Ray shoulder these burdens. Fear and pride and sorrow, and desire even.  
**  
The Powers remained silent on Victoria, cruelly mute. Fraser knows that sin eaters are made of the elements, air to infuse, water to cleanse, earth to absorb and break down, and fire to purify. Fraser is water, and too late he realized that Victoria was fire, a lost sin eater, unaware of her duty. The situation threw everything out of balance, Ray’s sins spilling over and mingling with the sins of Victoria and Fraser, who couldn’t wash them away.  
**  
Failure is a constant in Fraser’s journey, and he becomes acutely aware of why humans take it so personally, endure it so badly. His first Ray needs water, but his second needs air. Fraser ignores this reality to be near Ray, and, after so many years of silence from the Powers and failure as a sin eater, apathy festers within him.  
**  
The Powers constantly underestimate the human race, Fraser decides definitely after thirty-seven years. Ray finds his feet in the openness of the Northwest Territories, no sin eater to breathe life into him, and when he comes to the end of their journey he has found a peace outside of anything Fraser has done besides taking the journey alongside him.  
Fraser wants years more beside Ray, wants to respond to that desire he sees in Ray’s eyes. But one thing he knows , as if there’s a clock ticking somewhere within him,, is that he won’t be around long enough to see that happen.  
When he gives Ray’s hand a squeeze and puts him on a plane with empty promises to return to Chicago, it takes every ounce of willpower not to break down.  
**  
The Beaufort Sea pulls him, almost against his will, but he doesn’t shiver as he hits the icy water. His feet give out beneath him, and it takes a moment to figure out that it’s because he’s dissolving, turning to water and ice.  
He’s gone before he has time to mourn.


End file.
